Conservation Targets

The biodiversity at all conservation sites is a complex combination of genes, species, and ecological systems. Although most conservation teams want to conserve this entire complex system, they typically lack the staff, financial, and time resources to explicitly focus on all elements of biodiversity within the system. For this reason, when planning and monitoring conservation projects, it is useful to select a handful of “conservation targets” that can represent the overall biodiversity at your site. Doing so helps teams focus their efforts and resources and more easily assess whether their conservation efforts are effective over the long term. Choosing targets is a valuable step for all projects, irrespective of scale. Defining conservation targets sets the groundwork for subsequent steps, such as a practical and focused threats analysis, strategy development, and long-term monitoring. In addition, targets will help teams set goals for their project, as each target should have a goal associated with it (as well as multiple objectives and strategies that feed into it).

For place-based and target-based projects:

Targets can be ecosystems or species. Project teams generally select a limited number of ecosystem and species targets to collectively represent the full suite of biodiversity in the project area.

The target selection process is based on the coarse filter/fine filter approach. Coarse filter targets are those key ecosystems that, when conserved, are also likely to represent the conservation of the majority of species within the project area. The fine filter is composed of species and communities that are not well captured by coarse filter targets and require individual attention. These targets may be rare, face unique threats, or require unique strategies.

In theory – and hopefully in practice – conservation of the targets will ensure the conservation of all native biodiversity and key natural resources within the project scope. Selection of conservation targets typically requires input from experts and an analysis of spatial data. At this point, it is important to think about the potential impacts of climate change on your targets and geographic location. These impacts could potentially affect your target’s viability and the effectiveness of your conservation actions. Once these impacts are analyzed, you may need to revisit your targets and goals.

Human Wellbeing Targets

For some projects, it may be important to understand how the project not only affects biodiversity but also humans. The team may want to consider those components of human wellbeing affected by the status of conservation targets and through associated ecosystem services. Elements of human wellbeing include livelihoods, health, social cohesion, security, and governance, especially as related to established social development goals, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs are 17 integrated measures adopted by United Nations member states as of 2015 with the aim of being implemented by 2030 in order to achieve “social, economic and environmental sustainability”..

How To

Developing and using conservation targets involves identifying a representative suite of ecosystems and/or species your project will follow over the long term to gauge the status of biodiversity and resources at your site and the impact your actions are having. If relevant, the selection of human wellbeing targets involves identifying the ecosystems services provided by conservation targets and how they support human development.

List potential conservation targets

There is no prescribed way to develop a list of conservation targets that are representative of the biodiversity or natural resources at your site. How many targets to identify depends on the size of your project site, its ecological complexity, and whether you are engaged in spatial planning and priority setting or strategy and monitoring plan development (the latter of which requires you to get more specific).

It is important to keep the overall number of targets to those that are most representative of biodiversity within the scope of the project. Begin by listing any ecosystems you would like to include as targets, since these target types tend to include the majority of biodiversity in a given site. Next add any species or groups of species that are subject to threats that would continue even if the ecosystems you identified were not conserved (e.g., hunting, fishing, disease; See Step 2 below for additional details).

Review your initial list of targets and “lump” or “split” targets as necessary

Deciding whether to lump or split targets can seem somewhat confusing and the decision is not always clear-cut, but here are some general rules of thumb. Lump targets into one if they:

• Co-occur on the landscape,
• Share common ecological processess,
• Share similar critical threats, and therefore
• Require similar conservation strategies.

If a target contains species or ecosystems that do not meet the above criteria, you may want to think about splitting it.

Lumping and splitting your targets may be refined later in the planning process as you rank your threats and develop strategies. See Box 2 below for some examples of when to lump. See TNC (2006) for a useful decision tree on lumping and splitting targets.

You may use the following characteristics to prioritize your targets:

• Represent the biodiversity at the site. For place-based projects, the conservation targets should collectively represent or capture the array of ecological systems, communities, and species at the project area, and the multiple spatial scales at which they occur.
• Reflect ecoregional or landscape-level conservation goals. Project teams working in larger organizations that support landscape or ecoregional portfolios should try to ground their target selection in priorities expressed in those larger portfolios.
• Are viable or at least feasibly restorable. Viability (or integrity) indicates the ability of a conservation target to persist for many generations. If a target is on the threshold of collapse, or conserving a proposed target requires extraordinary human intervention, it may not represent the best use of limited conservation resources.
• Are highly threatened. All else being equal, focusing on highly threatened targets will help ensure that critical threats are identified and addressed through conservation actions.

Note: An additional consideration for conservation target selection is the strategic value of a target. If the target could leverage other conservation actions or generate synergies among partner organizations, then it may be an important target to include.

Selecting conservation targets is almost always a group effort. One person is rarely knowledgeable enough to develop a robust list of representative targets on his/her own. A group of people with broad ecological knowledge of the region and familiarity with the evidence should discuss and reach agreement on some limited combination of conservation targets that are representative of the region as a whole. It is often useful to have a facilitator for this process. If the team is missing any information to adequately select targets that represent biodiversity and focus the project so as to achieve the project vision, the team should discuss the implications of selecting interventions without this information and how you intend to manage risk by addressing information needs for target selection.

Select a limited number of conservation targets

Regardless of the size of your site, it is almost always possible to select a focused list of up to 8 targets that best capture both the biodiversity of the project site, as well as important threats and key conditions for success.* For large and complex scopes, you may find it helpful to have one or two additional targets, but as a rule of thumb, we recommend you do not identify greater than 10. Typically, these targets, be they keystone species or representative ecosystem types, are vital to your efforts because they also have a considerable umbrella effect in determining conservation success; conserving or restoring these targets will allow you to conserve many other targets not explicitly selected.**

*This seemingly magical number of 8 comes from years of experience The Nature Conservancy has had planning and designing conservation projects over thousands of sites.

**Sometimes teams wish to highlight a specific component of a target and will “nest” that component within the broader target. This “nested” target is an ecosystem, species, or ecological process that is also conserved if the broader target within which it is found is conserved. See Annex 2 for an example and a more detailed explanation of nested targets.

Identify ecosystems services and human wellbeing targets

Up until this point, the targets you have identified are biodiversity related. This does not mean that you will not or should not be using socio-economic actions to achieve the goals associated with these conservation targets. In fact, threats are generally caused by some social, economic, political, or cultural occurrence or situation. In order to counter the threats, your project will often need to use strategies to address human behavior. For example, if you are trying to protect a particular species of monkey, you might identify small-scale hunting for commercial purposes as one of the direct threats to the monkey. This hunting may be driven, in part, by a need for income. Thus, your team may use an alternative income strategy to provide small scale commercial hunters with an alternative source of income. In this case, your intervention is a social one (alternative livelihood strategy), but your end goal is a biodiversity one (protecting the monkeys). In later steps, we describe how to determine appropriate strategies.

However, if improving human wellbeing is not only a means to a conservation end, but an end in itself, the team will want to select human wellbeing targets in addition to conservation targets. You may start by identifying ecosystem services provided by your conservation targets. Then you can list the human populations of concern that may benefit from ecosystem services or from the project generally.

Examples

Two examples of targets are shown below. Figure 1 is adapted from a real world WWF island marine reserve site. First, the team identified the scope of their project as encompassing the entire marine reserve. They then thought about both ecosystems and species that encompassed the full expression of biodiversity at their site. They included key species in their targets, because conservation of their site’s ecosystems was not sufficient to ensure the survival of these species. Figure 2 is another example adapted from a real-world project team working in a tropical forest site. As in the first example, the project team tried to keep the overall number of targets to a reasonable level. This site has a mix of targets that includes ecosystems (e.g., primary forest), species (e.g., howler monkeys), and groups of species (top predators).

Practice

As a practice exercise, examine the following and determine which are conservation targets and which are not. Before looking at the answers at the bottom of the page, think about why they are or are not conservation targets.

Exercise

1. List potential conservation targets and provide a brief explanation of why they were chosen.
2. Lump or split targets, as necessary.
3. Select eight or fewer targets that meet the criteria described above and, if possible, include a map showing each target’s location.
4. Identify the ecosystem services supported by each of the conservation targets.
5. Select the human wellbeing targets and provide a brief explanation of why they were chosen.
6. If you are missing any information to adequately define your targets, discuss and describe the implications of selecting strategies without this information and how you intend to manage risk by addressing information needs.
7. Write a short paragraph about your impression of the process of selecting conservation targets. Include any challenges you had or anything you found to be useful.

Answers to Practice Exercises

Practice 1: The conservation targets would be pink dolphins and the Mamoré River and its tributaries. Water pollution is a direct threat. Deforestation and flooding are both stresses or the biophysical factors of direct threats such as unsustainable logging or conversion of forest to agriculture.

Practice 2: There is only one conservation target in this group: sea turtles. Sea lions’ breeding capacity is an indicator of sea lion health – the target should be sea lions, not their breeding capacity. Over fishing and tourism are direct threats. International markets are an indirect threat that might drive direct threats, such as overfishing.